Mohamed Bourouissa

Mohamed Bourouissa was born in 1978 in Bilda, Algeria, and was raised in Paris. Upon graduating in Visual Arts from the Sorbonne and in Photography from the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs de Paris, he trained at Le Fresnoy, a contemporary art school. Since 2002, Mohamed Bourouissa has been developing a fine art photography practice but also drawings and video works deeply rooted in social reality. He has produced a number of works exploring social reality, working within contemporary urban environments to explore the stereotypes surrounding geographical and social spaces. Périphérique (2005) is a series focusing on the territories and issues of the suburbs in France where he grew up. Bourouissa staged his subjects in the vernacular of the French Revolution, each scene working to address the reality of prejudices within society. His photographs are often inspired by historical painters such as Caravaggio, Delacroix, and Géricault, as well as contemporary photographers such as Jeff Wall, and Philip-Lorca diCorcia, thus rendering them deeply connected to art history.

Dave Southwood

Dave Southwood was born in Pietermaritzburg, South Africa, in 1971. He obtained a BA in 1995, majoring in History and Legal Studies at the University of Natal, Pietermaritzburg. A self-taught photographer, Southwood cites the ubiquitous David Goldblatt as an influence, as well as the "New Topographics" photographers such as Robert Adams, Lewis Baltz, and Stephen Shore. Despite the fact that no one particular subject dominates his oeuvre, he claims that all his work bears some relation to landscape. Southwood combines photography, social commitment, and a deep interest in urban landscapes. In 2000, together with some township photographers, he set up the first non-profit organization for street photographers in the Western Cape. The organization, Umlilo, remains active today. Milnerton Market (2011), a photographic essay compiled by Southwood over a decade of visiting Milnerton Market, provides an insight of an outskirt economy seeking to earn a living through the trade of second-hand items.

Lindeka Qampi

Lindeka Qampi was born in 1969 in Bolotwa, South Africa. She is a self-taught photographer who works primarily in the genre of Street Photography. In 2006, she started a career in photography after joining a collective of photographers known as Iliso Labantu. For the past decade, she has focused her attention on daily township life, and at its core, Khayelitsha, the township in which she has lived since her teens. She captures and shares what she sees, from the private sphere to the euphoria of child play. Her photographs express the poetry and politics of the ordinary act and therein the potential of imagining new possibilities for the future. Since 2012, Qampi has worked as a project facilitator alongside fellow South African photographer Zanele Muholi. One of their projects, which originated in Khayelitsha, was centered on introducing photography as a life skill and empowering tool to high school girls. In 2015, Qampi turned her lens onto herself and her immediate family with the release of a new series of work entitled Inside My Heart. She has also started work on Living in this World, the series that explores the issues of young township men growing up with absent father figures.

Ananias Léki Dago

Ananias Léki Dago was born in 1970 in Abidjan, Ivory Coast. In 1993, he graduated in Photography from the Institut National Supérieur de l’Action et de l’Animation Culturelle in Abidjan. His work is focused on the phenomenon of African cities and he defines himself as a ‘product of urban life’. The city has shaped his personality as a photographer, which is reflected in his unique photographic approach that focuses on everyday life within an urban context. In 2000, Léki Dago initiated and coordinated the first two editions of Les Rencontres du Sud, a month long photography biennial in his hometown. In 2006, he began exploring various cities in Africa. He went to South Africa where he started a project on shebeens - illegal bars or clubs where alcoholic beverages were sold without a license under the apartheid in the townships, later published in the book Shebeen Blues (2010). He also completed a project that he has been working on since 2006 about Bamako crosses, another urban phenomenon in the city. In 2009, Léki Dago was awarded the first prize of PhotoAfrica on his work on identity. His work is featured in several collections in Europe and the United States.

Uche Okpa-Iroha

Uche Okpa-Iroha was born in 1972 in Enugu, Nigeria. In 1997, he graduated in Food Engineering from the Federal University of Technology, Owerri, Nigeria. Uche was inspired to pursue a career in photography in 2005, after viewing an exhibition of his friend Emeka Okereke and other photographers from the Nigerian photographic collective Depth of Field. In 2009, he cofounded with Okereke the collective Invisible Borders, a photographic group which travel across Africa. His works from those trips have been exhibited worldwide. Uche won several awards including the Seydou keita Award for the best photography creation at the 8th Bamako Encounters with the project Under Bridge Life (2008). The series comprises images which reflect on the pulsating life of people under a bridge in Lagos. The photographer looks at the bridge from two sides, from two perspectives, thus revealing its complex nature: there is a traffic above, and there is one underneath, made up of moving people and moving light. Some photographs are constructed like portraits, with people gathering in the centre and looking straight ahead. Others look more like snap-shots, showing people in movement, caught while crossing the visual field of the image. Every images display a thread of light coming from above the bridge and entering the underground space through the breech in the construction.